Book Review: Take Me Home by Daniela Sacerdoti

I’m delighted to be one of the first stops on this Fiction Addiction blog tour for Daniela Sacerdoti’s Take Me Home. Do read on to the bottom and enter the giveaway for a paperback copy. Here’s the review:

What’s it about?

Inary Monteith’s life is at a crossroads. After a stolen night with her close friend Alex, she’s just broken his heart by telling him it was all a terrible mistake. Then she has to rush home from London to the Scottish Highlands when her little sister’s illness suddenly worsens – and in returning she must confront the painful memories she has been trying so hard to escape.

Back home, things become more complicated than she could ever have imagined. There’s her sister’s illness, her hostile brother, a smug ex she never wants to see again and her conflicted feelings about Alex in London and a handsome American she meets in Glen Avich. On top of that, she mysteriously loses her voice but regains a strange gift from her childhood – a sixth sense that runs in her family. And when a voice from the past keeps repeating, ‘Take me home’, she discovers a mystery that she knows she must unlock to set herself free.

Take Me Home is a beautiful story of love, loss, discovering one’s true abilities and, above all, never forgetting who you really are.

So not having previously read any of Daniela Sacerdoti’s books before I was keen to read as part of the book tour as I do like a good mystery. I’ve had Watch Over Me on my Kindle for ages which I now know is the first of Daniela’s Glen Avich set novels – you don’t need to have read it though to follow this story.

The prologue introduces us to Inary as a child and her Sight or gift when she ‘sees’ her recently passed neighbour in her garden so we know there is going to be a supernatural kind of theme.

We then move on to Inary as an adult and living her dream in London but who is then forced to return to her childhood home in order to spend time with her sister in her final weeks. She’s also using this as an opportunity to avoid Alex, one of her closest friends with whom things have now become a little more complicated. With the story being told in turn by Inary, Logan and Alex they each give us a different perspective of the events and their feelings which I quite liked and thought that the author had managed to give them their own voice.

Without trying to give too much away the plot moves on and Inary’s visions or Sight returns and present her with a mystery that haunted her as a child. This underlying story of what happened to Inary isn’t revealed till the last third of the novel and I was eager to find out what was going to happen and so it did hold my interest throughout.

Unfortunately for Inary grief manifests itself in many ways and for Inary it’s the loss of her voice leaving her forced to write down all her conversations. I’m not sure I felt this added anything really….and I actually felt Inary to be somewhat selfish in her treatment of Alex with her constant shut downs and pick ups, a little whimsical!

Once the mystery is revealed, I thought more could have been developed from this. I thought Inary would have had more of a physical involvement of Rose’s discovery and would have been at the actual site.

I loved this quote from the book from one of the supporting characters – I just hope it bears some truth!

“What’s for you, won’t go past you”

I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads because I really enjoyed it, got totally swept along with the story, the characters and that’s good enough for me. Whilst reading I felt it was reminiscent of that Scottish soap Take The High Road :), in its descriptions of the area, the people and the local dialect used. Overall, a suspensful read about grief, loss and coming out the other side.

Daniela Sacerdoti is a mother and a writer. Born in Naples, but brought up in a small village in the Italian Alps, she lives near Glasgow with her husband and sons. She calls herself a thief of time – she steals time to write when everyone has gone to bed, or before they wake up. She’s a Primary teacher, but she chose to be at home with her children. She loves being with her boys, doing art with them, reading anything she can get her hands on and chatting with her girlfriends. But she also adores being on her own, free to daydream and make up stories.

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